Get out your maps, erasers, and wallet
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Dr. Grace C. Wu, EXPERT ON INDIAN AND BLACK OPPRESSION
Professors identify 960 racist names in the national park system. And they have a nifty paper with all sorts of charts and statistics to prove it. Can you give me a great big yawn?
Yellowstone, Crater Lake, are just two of the names teed up for replacement.
“Seemingly innocuous names, and names of forgotten or obscure individuals are perhaps just as pernicious as names for outright racist or violent individuals,” the study stated.
“Neutral-seeming settler names build a white-normative culture in the place,” the article stated. These names also “perpetuate the invisibility of Indigenous people on landscapes” and “demonstrate that settlers have the power to suppress deep Indigenous knowledge with relatively shallow Eurocentric names.”
The study also identified 254 names that support white supremacy, such as Roys Peak in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. These names “erase Indigenous knowledge” and support white supremacy.
The study also reported that 214 names appropriate Indigenous language, 205 names replace an Indigenous place name with a colonizer name, and 52 names honored violent individuals. Others, such as Yellowstone National Park, were “the work of white urban power elites,” including Teddy Roosevelt.
The researchers wrote that “white hegemonic symbols embedded in parks can contribute to a perception that white people are the primary stewards and knowledge keepers of nature” and as a result make racial minorities feel excluded. “Black people are 13% of the US population yet they are only 1% of US national park visitors, while white people are 76% of the US population and 96% of visitors,” the paper noted.
Should we forcibly round up our inner-city residents and bus them to the parks? Just asking.
By renaming the “offensive” national park names, marginalized groups will become empowered, according to the study.
How will renaming an offensive name like “Yellowstone” to “Buffalo Nations Valley” empower Tyrone of the Bronx? The authors don’t say.
But, the new names cannot be neutral as it would still support “white dominance.”
Lead author Grace Wu, a person who is probably still smarting at the indignity of being assigned a specific gender and white man’s name by a racist, patriarchal society, is a little vague on how the money to rename 960 parks, with appropriate signage, is to be extracted from an already- cash-starved parks system, but that’s a quibble that misses the main point: her Indian friends lost — get over it.
No primitive culture anywhere has ever withstood conquest by a technologically superior one, and our own Indians were no exception. A stone-age people who had never figured out the wheel, let alone a written language or, as the name implies, smelting, they were doomed to be shoved aside. To expect white settlers to have stopped at the eastern shore of the continent and return to Europe, thwarted, because, “gosh, there are already other people here”, is as foolish and removed from reality as believing that the Klamath People’s Great Spirit gmok’am’c is going to return to earth, kick out the whites (and Chinese-Americans), and return the land to the people who displaced more primitive cultures before them.
It’s not going to happen. I won’t be reclaiming my Huguenot ancestors’ castles in France, Tall Feathers Coming Over Hill shouldn’t expect the return of the beaches presently occupied by Miss Wu and her friends at UC Santa Barbara. Or at least, he shouldn’t; these days, who knows?
